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Twins Video
This is the first piece in a series of articles to kick off the offseason, here at Twins Daily. Each day, we'll tackle a different aspect or element of the team's predicament and their collapse at the end of this season--a different place where the buck might stop, and why, and what makes the assignment of blame complicated. We're calling it Ripple Effects.
In 2024, the Minnesota Twins had an estimated payroll of approximately $130 million (21st in MLB), down from $160 million in 2023 and lower than their 2018 number (which ranked only 18th in the league). Spending in the bottom third of the league is no reliable way to put a winning team on the field, but it's perfectly possible to do so. Alas, this Twins team is seemingly built on the assumption of being somewhere in the middle of the league. There's a mismatch that matters just as much as the raw dollar number or payroll ranking.
Payrolls are not created equally. Even similar payrolls can be distributed in wildly varying ways. The 2024 Twins—and, to an even greater extent, the 2025 Twins—could be described as a stars-and-scrubs distribution. Over the weekend, anonymous reports surfaced suggesting that the Twins could be facing a similar payroll limit in 2025 as they did in 2024. Although this is better than news that payroll would drop further, the club could be facing a less flexible situation than the one that forced them to cut $30 million in salaries ahead of 2024.
In 2025, Carlos Correa will earn $36 million, Pablo López will earn $21.5 million, and Byron Buxton will earn $15 million--before any of his $10,000,000 in performance bonuses are potentially met. These three salaries add up to $72.5 million. If the Twins indeed have a payroll limit of $130 million again, that leaves $56 million to fill the other 23 roster spots.
Other guaranteed contracts will eat up about $20.5 million of that leftover money, and players in arbitration will eat up more still. But even without those immediate expenditures, it’s hard to fill 23 spots with $56 million in today’s league.
Buxton’s extension ahead of 2022 could be classified as team-friendly, as the team bought low on an oft-injured but supremely talented player, only paying top dollar if he played full seasons and won awards. Correa’s contract is the largest in team history, and López’s extension is the most the club has ever doled out to a pitcher—both deals conveniently being struck in 2023, during the highest payroll season in team history.
From the outside, it seems clear that those deals were struck based on the belief that payroll would, at a bare minimum, stick around that $160 million range, if not increase. If the club had held pat at the $160 million mark, they would be looking at $86 million to divide between players not named Correa, López, or Buxton. That’s far more manageable, as the big three would only constitute 46% of the team’s salaries, rather than the 57% they project to soak up in 2025 based on a $130 million budget.
It matters, too, that the team (mostly) knowingly made such heavy investments in three players who don't play a high volume of baseball and impact as high a percentage of the team's action as one might hope. Using the most generous math possible (counting all plate appearances taken by both Buxton and Correa and all the balls hit to each in the field, even ground ball singles to Buxton in center, as well as all López's batters faced), the trio played a role in 17.4% of the team's combined batting and pitching plate appearances this year.
Obviously, that number pales in comparison to the percentage of the payroll they take up, but that's normal. You pay an outsize rate for established stars whom you can confidently project to be above-average, knowing you'll pay a bargain-basement rate for the guys who are just getting started. It's how baseball economics work, and it's not even necessarily irrational. But the ratio of 57% to 17% is much different than that of 46% to 17%--and crucially, there's another number to consider. If both Buxton and Correa were closer to everyday players, like many expensive stars (think Juan Soto, Bobby Witt, José Ramírez, etc.), that 17% number could scale up close to 24%. López's impact is bounded by the way all teams now use starting pitchers, and he provides plenty of volume for his cost and position, but if you're going to pay north of $50 million for two players against a total payroll south of $150 million, you'd like them to consistently qualify for the batting title.
The teams who can afford to hold onto low-volume players with concentrated impact in less playing time are the ones spending north of $200 million, so investing in Buxton and Correa this way seemed to signal a belief that payroll would steadily increase. It immediately did the opposite.
Of the nine teams with lower payrolls than the Twins have in 2024, only two have a single player with a higher salary than Buxton’s—Kansas City’s Salvador Perez, and Washington’s Patrick Corbin and Stephen Strasburg. Many of the teams above them don’t have a López-level contract, let alone Correa’s—which currently ranks sixth-largest in all of baseball heading into 2025.
These salaries would provide some strain on the $160 million number, but at $130 million, the roster is being stretched to its limits, especially as prominent players like Joe Ryan, Bailey Ober, Griffin Jax, and Jhoan Durán are entering their arbitration years and will no longer be making the league-minimum salary of roughly $750,000.
If the front office was aware of the impending payroll reductions, this was poor planning—or at least, an unusual show of risk acceptance from a highly risk-averse group. If the decision-makers were blindsided entirely by ownership over this change, it’s a disservice to the team and the fans, and I don’t say that lightly.
One common refrain amid the Twins’ collapse in 2024 was that ownership’s unwillingness to meet last year’s spending, or even 90% of it, was a crucial factor in the team’s fate. One common retort to that complaint was that the Twins outspent the Guardians, Royals, and Tigers—each of whom finished ahead of Minnesota in the final standings.
However, due to the constraints associated with beginning the offseason with more money on the books than they were allowed to commit by Opening Day, the club was restricted from making the adjustments that every club needs to make every year. No matter the payroll, there’s no team that doesn’t enter the offseason with some sort of hole on the roster that needs addressing. A payroll number for a given season matters, but the direction in which it's moving from previous years matters, too. A shrinking payroll changes the implications of every contract on the books, and all for the worse.
For example, the Twins needed a starting pitcher. Instead of having $15 million in flexibility to spend on a Michael Wacha- or Seth Lugo-caliber replacement for their outgoing arms, they were consigned to taking on Anthony DeSclafani to balance out Jorge Polanco’s salary and calling the hole filled. At the trade deadline, reports indicated difficulty bringing on any player’s salary over $1 million.
Regardless of the salary the team starts the offseason with, there needs to be some flexibility to fill holes, either over the offseason or during the season via trade. It does not matter what the total salary is when the team, for example, needs one more reliable reliever. That’s something that needs to be fixed now, not last year.
And so when a team enters a season committing $74 million of their $130 million payroll to three players, they’re kneecapped, regardless of what everyone else is spending around them. That concentration of salary is built for a $160-million payroll, or an even greater one, given the specific identities of those three players. The team cannot truly address needs when so few funds remain to fill in the rest of the roster. Instead, they’re bound to build from within.
Building from within isn’t a bad thing—it’s what every team should be trying to do. But filling every hole on the roster year-to-year with internal pieces leaves a lot up to fate, hoping that your Austin Martins are ready on time to step in as a fourth outfielder. And that highlights an important piece—these holes don’t always necessitate a Nelson Cruz-level addition. But even a Carlos Santana or Michael A. Taylor can be a nearly impossible acquisition, when that signing makes up 10% of a team's remaining payroll.
You can miss a bit on your other moves when you have a middle-of-the-road payroll and those three big salary earners. When you’re in the bottom third, you need to hit on 95% of your other decisions to properly build around them. No one is that good, in the fiercely competitive world of professional baseball. It's not possible to be.
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